The battle of the billionaires is on as the Mark Zuckerberg-led company Meta launched Threads, a new “conversation” app and direct challenger to Elon Musk’s Twitter.
In roughly 24 hours, over 30 million subscribers signed up, according to Zuckerberg. The launch was also met with a threat of legal action from Musk.
Regardless, will these new users translate to growth for the social media giant?
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In an interview with FOX Business, Richard Strasburger, a finance adviser at Raymond James, said, “Threads will certainly add to the value of Meta, but how big it becomes only time will tell.”
Meta shares have already gained over 140% this year pre-Threads.
“Meta already has a large user base and great understanding of social media giving it an advantage over previous competitors to Twitter,” he added. “It comes down to who do you have the most confidence in — Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg or Twitter’s Elon Musk.
“Twitter, on the other hand, has lost users and employees since Musk took over, but he has a good track record, so I wouldn’t count him out too fast.”
In a sign of the competitiveness between the two, Musk and Zuckerberg agreed prior to the launch to a so-called cage match in the octagon. UFC’s Dana White weighed in, telling TMZ “both guys are absolutely dead serious about this.”
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The new Threads app can be downloaded from the Apple store and is billed as “Instagram’s text-based conversation app,” with the listing teasing a Twitter-like microblogging experience.
Users, who must be at least 12 years old, will be able to keep their Instagram account and their usernames and follow the same accounts on the new app, according to screenshots displayed on the App Store listing.
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Musk took over Twitter Oct. 27 and has been slimming down the company and instituting new protocols ever since.
The company has rolled out a series of changes in recent days, including rate limits on the number of tweets users can view.
Musk imposed the rate limits because of “extreme levels” of data scraping and system manipulation, saying that Twitter was “getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading the user experience!”
The rate limits gradually rose from 6,000 posts per day for verified accounts and 600 posts per day for unverified accounts, to 10,000 for verified users and 1,000 for unverified users.
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Musk attributed the cause of excessive dating scraping on Twitter to artificial intelligence (AI) companies pulling in data for the purpose of training their models.
Twitter also released a requirement for users to be verified to use the online dashboard TweetDeck.
The policy announced Monday takes effect in 30 days and appears to be aimed at raising extra revenue because users need to pay have their accounts verified under Musk’s changes. TweetDeck is popular with companies and news organizations, allowing users to manage multiple Twitter accounts.
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FOX Business reporters Eric Revell and Sarah Rumpf-Whitten contributed to this report.